Mikaela Shiffrin is just getting started on a gold-medal run

By Elliott Almond, Bay Area News Group

Thursday, February 15, 2018

DAEGWALLYEONG-MYEON, South Korea — The waiting was the hardest part.

Mikaela Shiffrin had almost a week of pent-up anticipation before barrelling down a white carpet above a mountain village boasting this country’s coldest average temperatures that mercifully backed off Thursday in time for the women’s giant slalom.

Shiffrin had a plan: "go, go, go" to gold.

The American skiing sensation made the most of the moment at the Yongpyong Alpine Centre to collect her first title at the Pyeongchang Games with a 0.39-second victory with an inspiring performance in the women’s giant slalom.

Ragnhild Mowinckel of Norway was second, followed by Federica Brignone of Italy in third.

But none could touch the reigning World Cup overall champion who hopes her performance is the first of a big medal haul in Korea.

"You don’t even know," Shiffrin said of making her 2018 Winter Games debut four days later than planned. "Last night I was like, ‘Are we ever going to race?’ "

The infamous kalbaram, or "knife wind," had sabotaged the alpine skiing schedule in the Taebaek Mountains. But Shiffrin and her technical ski brethren awoke Thursday to sun rays spraying across a sparkling course.

Now she has to duplicate the effort Friday (Thursday, Pacific) in her signature event, the slalom that she won at the Sochi Games four years ago. Depending on the rest of the schedule, Shiffrin probably will ski four disciplines here.

She entered the second run Thursday needing a strong descent. Shiffrin, 22, wasted no time seizing the lead and maintaining it to the bottom. The result was particularly satisfying for the Vail, Colorado, skier who at 18 became the youngest Olympic slalom gold medalist in history four years ago.

Although on track to become one of the greatest slalom skiers in history, Shiffrin has struggled with the GS, a technical event where the gates are separated at a greater distance than the slalom.

Shiffrin described it as a love-hate relationship.

"It has been a tough event for me, I don’t know, to get the good feeling in," she said. "It’s more difficult for me to get a good rhythm in GS. I need to train it a lot. I need to be in a good mood. I need to be aggressive."

Those feelings manifested themselves at the start of the second run in the afternoon.

"There were moments where I thought I don’t know if I’m good enough to do this," Shiffrin acknowledged. "Then there were moments I thought, "Who cares, you got to try."

It didn’t surprise her coach, Mike Day.

"True champions are able to produce that whenever it’s needed," he said.

Shiffrin held nothing back on a second run that put her on the icy edge of tumbling back to earth. Skiing in the penultimate position of the 30 top performers from the morning run, the American star felt she had no choice but to go big.

"Everyone wants gold," Shiffrin said. "Everybody is skiing to win."

She fell to the ground only at the finish line afterward. Shiffrin described it as her 15 seconds to let out the emotions.

The victory was all the more impressive because of the unpredictable weather that has forced so many schedule changes. Shiffrin was ready to ski all five alpine disciplines based on the original schedule.

But it takes a toll on skiers who have to switch training on a whim.

"One of the hardest things about it was we kept flipflopping events," Day said. "If we had stuck with GS the whole time, it would have been a little easier to deal with because we still would have been focused on this event."

The event also included Kim Ryon Hyang, one of 22 North Koreans competing at the Winter Olympics. She finished in 67th place after the first run and was disqualified after the second effort.

Shiffrin is on the other spectrum of alpine ski racing. A woman who has dominated the World Cup circuit this season that saw her win nine of 10 consecutive races was fifth in the giant slalom in Sochi, Russia.

It didn’t matter which race took place first in Korea. Shiffrin just wanted to get on the course. "The toughest thing is just to mentally tide yourself over until it is time to go," she said. "Now we’ve been race-ready for the past basically five days in a row."

America’s top skier not named Lindsey Vonn regained her rhythm three weeks after the season took a detour in a slalom race in Switzerland. Shiffrin blamed a momentary lapse on doing too many downhill races before the Pyeongchang Games.

It showed after she had built a seemingly insurmountable one-second lead after one run in that Swiss slalom. Then Shiffrin skied off course near the end of the second run in an uncharacteristic mess up. A victory would have clinched a fifth slalom World Cup title, but she remains in contention for the discipline title as well as the prestigious overall crown.

"We pushed too hard and unfortunately, for one week, we paid for it," Day said.

Shiffrin rebooted after the World Cup blunder, and it showed Thursday. Boy, did it show.

"I was loose," said Shiffrin, who described the course in the morning has having a false flat.

"You can push into it so hard, it feels like perfect" on top, she said. "Then on the middle, it got a little more chattery. So it seems like it’s been tossing everybody around a little bit more."

First up is the slalom. Then Shiffrin presumably will join Vonn in the downhill Wednesday and the combined Feb. 23.

The women’s super-G is scheduled for Saturday, which she hinted at skipping.

"We’re going to have to make some tough choices but appropriate choices moving forward," Day said.